Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Taking the carbon dioxide out of coal!

bio2 - 27-2-2008 at 07:23

As parts of the planet experience the coldest winter on record we have the "illustrious" Bill Clinton making the following asinine statement.

Read it and weep.


.................................................
Today in Portsmouth, Ohio, he said, "So Hillary says, in 2005, the United States Congress adopted the Bush-Cheney energy bill, which gave $27 billion in subsidies to nuclear, oil, and gas and coal. The only thing that was justified was clean coal, because countries are going to be using that............... We have to figure out how to take the carbon dioxide out of it............ The rest of it is waste. If you elect me, I'll repeal those subsidies. And put them into a strategic energy fund that will create American jobs for America's future with clean energy."

If you coughed and missed the "Hillary says" in that sentence you might be surprised when he reaches the "if you elect me" part of the pitch more than 60 words later.

Because after all he's not running for anything.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/february2008/260208_b_C...

Phosphor-ing - 27-2-2008 at 07:56

If we take the Carbon out of the coal then we have solved everything!!! These people (read global warming types) are out there making these statements with absolutely no clue to the science involved. According to Billary's statement my breath is a pollutant!:mad:

YT2095 - 27-2-2008 at 08:01

haven`t we been taking the CO2 out of coal for the last 200+ years Anyway?

Nerro - 27-2-2008 at 08:48

@YT2095
Quite.

Perhaps he meant that we must find techniques to avoid the emission of CO<sub>2</sub>?

12AX7 - 27-2-2008 at 12:11

I don't see why nobody has yet built a giant greenhouse, where the stack gasses are cooled further, cleaned up (removing some of the worse toxins) and distributed to plants. The limiting factor seems to be CO2 availability, so after a few thousand generations (plus genetic modification), some incredibly fast growing plants should be growing there. Then it's just a matter of periodically harvesting them, drying and throwing back into the system!

Tim

microcosmicus - 27-2-2008 at 12:41

Actually, somebody has. I don't have a reference, but once on television, they
showed somebody who was using smokestack gases to feed algae. Just as
you said, they harvested and dried them, thereby producing extra value from exhaust.

12AX7 - 27-2-2008 at 13:37

Yeah, that's a start -- but not on nearly big enough a scale, and it takes energy to bubble gas through all that water column. A greenhouse, once built (and maintained, which is a potential problem) needs only a few inches water column to blow all that gas through the whole thing.

Tim

Nerro - 27-2-2008 at 13:41

@12AX7
I've been thinking about that as well. There is a company here in the Netherlands that uses the heat from a power plant nearby to heat the water in a shrimpfarm.

Another perhaps more interesting option might be to bubble the CO<sub>2</sub> through water containing algea. The algea might provide food or fuel or perhaps even medicines if they can be genetically engineered sufficiently.

tumadre - 27-2-2008 at 14:34

I think the only issue is the sheer land area and construction of such a green house or pond.

At 50 watts per square meter of O2 production we need 20 square kilometers per gigawatt.
+ (base load divided by ratio of sunup/sundown) + [insert more math here]


Just realized that isn't *that* big.

[Edited on 27-2-2008 by tumadre]

MagicJigPipe - 27-2-2008 at 14:59

Yes, but imagine if every coal power plant had to buy that extra land. Also, it must be economically beneficial (make at least SOME money) for companies to start doing it on a large scale. Technology and materials aren't the problem IMO. It's land. A corporation will only buy that much land if they know for sure they can profit from it. Can you imagine if every coal power facility had to "take up" an extra 15+ square miles?

It would be a great solution though. Unfortunately, corporations are run by investors that only care about one thing: Money.

Maybe when I become a billionaire I'll start my own power company (financed by my own funds) that tries new things like that. Ha! Oh well, I can dream can't I?

[Edited on 27-2-2008 by MagicJigPipe]

Xenoid - 27-2-2008 at 15:31

There is an article on CO2 sequestering in the latest New Scientist Magazine;

Crystal sponges capture carbon emissions

23 February 2008
Andy Coghlan
Magazine issue 2644
CRYSTALLINE sponges pocked with pores that are just the right size to trap carbon dioxide molecules could filter the fumes from power stations and cars. What's more, the trapped CO2 can then be sucked from the crystals and piped into containers and buried underground, allowing the crystals to be reused.

Carbon capture and storage has been touted as a powerful weapon against global warming. Until now, the only way to strip CO2 from car exhaust, flue gases or power-plant emissions was to bubble them through a solvent that reacts with CO2. The trouble is that subsequently removing the gas from the solvent requires heat, limiting the efficiency of the process. "Anything that has the potential to reduce this 'energy penalty' is extremely valuable," says Stuart Haszeldine, an expert on carbon capture at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

So Omar Yaghi and colleagues at the University of California, Los ...

The full article isn't freely available online.

But it goes on to describe ZIFs (zeolitic imidazolate frameworks) made by blending cobalt or zinc with imidazolates - the pore size depends on the imidazolate used.
.... the most efficient soaked up 83 times is own volume of CO2 with little CO ... .... were optimistic that within a year these materials will be ready for testing in power stations.... .... they withstood temperatures of 400 oC.

pyrochemix - 17-3-2008 at 22:35

greenhouse gases is a theory developed on mercury i think, still earths volcanic eruptions have let out more "chlorofluorocarbons"
then we ever will, its just political propaganda so that they can make "cleaner cars that recycle half the emissions back through the engines" so that way you have to buy a new car in 5 years!!!!!

not_important - 17-3-2008 at 22:51

Good to see the scientific method is alive and well in Vulpesville.

Have a reference or citation for natural chlorofluorocarbons?

Nicodem - 18-3-2008 at 01:53

Quote:
Originally posted by pyrochemix
greenhouse gases is a theory developed on mercury i think, still earths volcanic eruptions have let out more "chlorofluorocarbons"
then we ever will, its just political propaganda so that they can make "cleaner cars that recycle half the emissions back through the engines" so that way you have to buy a new car in 5 years!!!!!

I must admit that I had a laugh reading this. :D
However, fighting putative propaganda and misinformation with more propaganda and more misinformation (not to say stupidity) might be acceptable on some forums, but members here prefer serious discussion over nonsense. Same goes for your wannabe funny comment in the "Drug Cooking" vs "Bomb Making" thread. Please straighten up.

No more suntan lotion

franklyn - 19-3-2008 at 08:23

Demagoguery http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demagogy
and Cassandra like invocations (scroll down to - The environment movement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_%28metaphor%29
serve to muster the public to action. Cynically, those old enough to remember
will recall the so called " Energy Crisis " and the " Limits to Growth " thesis
of times past. The so called " global warming " rant is a very old one.
http://www.sciencemadness.org/talk/viewthread.php?tid=4108&a...

Interestingly the possibility of cooling the planet rapidly and at very little cost
exists and is readily applicable should the need ever arise. An observation that
escaped attention due to its subtlety is that the rate which water evaporates
has diminished over the same time period as the emission of " green house gases ".
Known as the pan evaporation rate, this reduction initially provoked speculation
that the sun was radiating less. Investigation of this phenomenon revealed the
reason to be the suspended particulates in the atmosphere reflect considerable
light back away from the earth. The experimental proof of this came about when
all air traffic in the United States was ceased for two days following the attack
on the World Trade Center Buildings on September 11 , 2001. The absence of
jet aircraft contrails in the stratosphere produced a global mean temperature rise
of about 1/2 of a degree Centigrade.The changed albedo of the earth did the
trick.

The immediate palpable effect of a comparatively vanishingly small volume of
frozen mist to the immensity of the daily global output of CO2 and the amount
already in the atmosphere demonstrates that this effect is 10's of thousands
of times greater than so called green house warming. This effect had been
characteristically ominously promoted during the Soviet era nuclear weapons
arms race as the so called " nuclear winter " syndrome that was projected
to be the result of world war III. Retrofitting commercial aircraft with the means
of dispersing an aerosol that remains aloft, will over a short time reduce
incident solar radiation, effecting a global cooling. The best part of this scheme
is that it is reversible and can be tuned as circumstances warrant.

You are not likely to hear of this any time soon. That would undermine the
pretext for a seizure of power, much as the current " terrorist threat " has.

.

While on the subject

franklyn - 27-3-2008 at 18:07

- Continued from my post above -

To further elaborate, retrofitting high altitude commercial aircraft with
a system to output aerosol particulates is easily implemented and does
not unduly burden anyone with hardship. Similar sort of equipment added
to the engines have been investigated and studied but for other reasons
and applications > http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/reports/2004/CR-2004-212957.pdf
A reasonable payload might be 1600 pounds, allowing 400 pounds for the
hardware and containers, leaving 1200 pounds of actual dispersed payload
which is just the amount of three 55 gallon drums. As to cost incurred, a
figure of 2 million dollars per aircraft seems reasonable. Multiply that by
the number of suitable aircraft to be rigged ( I'm guessing a number ) say
15 thousand, and you derive an estimate of 30 Billion dollars. So what is
that, the cost for 2 weeks of the war in Iraq ? Are you starting to get
the drift of the ridiculousness of Malthusian apocalyptic claims that
solving global warming will cost trillions of dollars and will require the
reformation of the worlds economy. Some further reading -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrail

This next associated item I chanced across is just plain w e i r d.
It essentially describes in somewhat more detail the system I described
above, but with an sinister overtone of conspiracy. Could this per
chance be a counterintelligence effort by global warming proponents.
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/chemspewermechanics17apr05.sh...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemtrail_conspiracy_theory

,.

[Edited on 27-3-2008 by franklyn]

Neil - 14-4-2008 at 13:24

Quote:
Originally posted by 12AX7
I don't see why nobody has yet built a giant greenhouse, where the stack gasses are cooled further, cleaned up (removing some of the worse toxins) and distributed to plants. The limiting factor seems to be CO2 availability, so after a few thousand generations (plus genetic modification), some incredibly fast growing plants should be growing there. Then it's just a matter of periodically harvesting them, drying and throwing back into the system!

Tim



Vegetable farms... use the CO2 to create food, or hemp plants and use them to create bio plastics...

JohnWW - 14-4-2008 at 16:44

As regards utilizing or recycling CO2 emissions resulting from industrial combustion of coal or oil etc. the following post of mine in the restricted References section, in the "references wanted" thread, is relevant to this thread:

Green chemistry - manufacture of polycarbonates using CO2 from thermal power stations or industrial furnaces instead of COCl2, with H2O byproduct instead of HCl.

Polycarbonates have been conventionally made for several decades by reacting diols or diphenols, with the -OH groups at either end of fairly long molecules, such as bisphenol A, HO-C6H4-C(CH3)2-C6H4-OH (which results in "Lexan"), with COCl2, in pyridine usually. This results in polymeric covalent carbonates, with HCl as byproduct which reacts with the pyridine to form the hydrochloride. According to these recent news items dated 8th April:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080408144824.ht...
Carbon Dioxide Removed From Smokestacks Could Be Useful In DVD And CD-ROM Manufacture; and

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/04/08/global-warming...
Chemists say CDs, eyeglass lenses could help stem global warming

the COCl2 used in the process, which is effectively a typical esterification with a dicarboxylic acid chloride, can be replaced with CO2, which is the anhydride of carbonic acid. Pyridine is then not necessary to remove the HCl byproduct. These items read as follows:

In separate reports presented at the 235th annual meeting of the American Chemical Society on April 8, 2008, Thomas E. Müller, Ph.D., and Toshiyasu Sakakura, Ph.D., described innovative ways of making polycarbonate plastics from CO2. Those processes offer consumers the potential for less expensive, safer and greener products compared to current production methods, the researchers agreed.
"Carbon dioxide is so readily available, especially from the smokestack of industries that burn coal and other fossil fuels," Müller said. He is at the new research center for catalysis CAT, a joint 5-year project of RWTH Aachen and industrial giant Bayer Material Science AG and Bayer Technology Services GmbH. "And it's a very cheap starting material. If we can replace more expensive starting materials with CO2, then you'll have an economic driving force."

I found these additional references to the new polycarbonate process:

http://digital.sabanciuniv.edu/tezler/etezfulltext/calikyesi...
http://www.impactlab.com/2008/04/12/capturing-carbon-to-crea...
http://globaledge.msu.edu/industries/industry.asp?industryID...
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/gen/fy01/30717.pdf
http://www.urth.tv/content/view/29753/213/
http://www.japancorp.net/article.asp?Art_ID=9093

Have the reports to the ACS on the new process been published as a PDF yet by the ACS in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, or other ACS publication? I could not find such a PDF publication in a Google search. If it has, and someone has access to the most recent issues of the JACS as PDFs, please post it here. Thanks.

Vogelzang - 4-5-2008 at 11:47

Check out these articles.

http://truckersandcitizensunited.theamericandriver.com/modul...

Vogelzang - 2-12-2008 at 05:21

President-elect Barack Obama proposes economic suicide for US
By Christopher Booker
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2...

http://tinyurl.com/6a6q8f


[Edited on 2-12-2008 by Vogelzang]

not_important - 2-12-2008 at 08:03

Quote:
Originally posted by Vogelzang
President-elect Barack Obama proposes economic suicide for US
By Christopher Booker
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2...



This is what is known as an opinion, not a study. As an opinion, I would note that near the start of it is a photo captioned
Quote:
The 10,000 turbines in the US generate less power than a single coal-fired plant

The U.S. has an installed wind power name plate capacity of around 21 GW, using the typical capacity factor of 0.3 gives 6.3 GW, which is definitely more than any coal fired power plant; the total amount of electric power produced by wind in the U.S. in 2008 is expected to be in the range of 45 to 50 TWh or a bit over 1.5% of the total electric power production within the U.S.

The largest coal fire plants produce over 1 GW of power each, there are 12 of these in the U.S., the typical plant is under 300 MW capacity.

So right off that caption is incorrect, by a factor of 6 for the largest coal power plants, by twenty-fold for the typical plant. This leads me to distrust the remainder of the op-ed piece.

chief - 3-12-2008 at 04:51

The anti-CO2 lobbyism is just a propaganda
==> for oil
==> against coal,
and therefrom it comes: From the big-oil-think-tanks.

Every kWh out of oil _must_ emit lower CO2 than from coal, because the oil stores part of it's energy in C-H bond, unlike the coal, which has only carbon in it to burn. It's a hidden tax on air too, by the way.

Vogelzang - 8-12-2008 at 05:24

Money being made from warming scare
Larry Thornberry
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2008/dec/02/money-being-made...

watson.fawkes - 8-12-2008 at 05:58

Quote:
Originally posted by Vogelzang
Money being made from warming scare
Larry Thornberry
Just because it appears in print doesn't make it true.

chief - 8-12-2008 at 11:21

I bet: Climate warming is a hoax !

Vogelzang - 8-12-2008 at 15:37

CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal Of Our Time by Zbigniew Jaworowski
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/20_1-2...

Read the part on page 16 that says:

We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse. Strong elaborated on the idea of sustainable development, which, he said, can be implemented by deliberate quest of poverty . . . reduced resource consumption . . . and set levels of mortality control.

Vogelzang - 20-12-2008 at 17:15

Quote:

during the Clinton-Gore Administration I was told what I could and could not say during congressional testimony. Since it was well known that I am skeptical of the view that mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions are mostly responsible for global warming, I assumed that this advice was to help protect Vice President Gore’s agenda on the subject.


Testimony of Roy W. Spencer before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on 22 July 2008 (pdf format)
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View...

not_important - 20-12-2008 at 21:22

Quote:
Originally posted by Vogelzang... which, he said, can be implemented by deliberate quest of poverty . . .


Well, the U.S. certainly has been pursuing that goal the last eight years.

So let's look at some of the arguments in that document. From the CO2 Scandal
Quote:
Why do we not see a global-scale effort to replace the internal combustion automobile engine with a zero-pollution compressed-air engine?


Perhaps because such an automobile has no better well-to-wheel efficiency than a hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicle, and less that either standard IC engines, hybrids, or pure battery electric vehicles. More than half the power input is lost in the compression process, mostly as low grade heat; around 10% more is lost in the expansion. Compressed air cars don't like cold weather, even the models being promoted in India have a fuel burner to supply heat to the expanding air.
Quote:
combined with a switch from oil, gas, and coal into nuclear energy? But at the November 2006 mass meeting in Nairobi of 6,000 followers of Kyoto (including U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Presidents of Kenya and Switzerland, and a cortège of ministers from some 180 countries), the participants were pressed to not even mention nuclear energy


Rightly or wrongly, many do not believe nuclear power to be as trouble free and cost effective as its proponents claim. Besides that, the U.S. wants tight controls on nuclear technology, controls that would leave most countries dependent on the few existing nuclear powers for future fuel needs. Unlike the U.S., whose military budget is half the world total on military items, most of those countries have no way to influence or threaten the nuclear fuel providers into not cutting off their fuel supply because the dependent country failed to only teach abstinence only sex ed or something.
Quote:
Maurice Strong, who dropped out of school at age 14,


Thomas Edison, less than a year of formal schooling; obvious failure and fraud.

I will note that 21st CENTURY Science & Technology is not peer reviewed, and is a publication of of Lyndon Larouche with a history of publishing defective articles.

A response to some of Jaworowski's claims is here http://www.someareboojums.org/blog/?p=7

Vogelzang - 21-12-2008 at 09:24

This is funny. Hundreds of people were suckered into signing a petition for banning dihydrogen monoxide (water). See videos here:

Penn And Teller Get Hippies To Sign Water Banning Petition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw

Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Environmental Hysteria
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inGR5ZDgWzs

Penn and teller global warming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbHKOM4c6H8

Penn & Teller: Bullshit! Being Green
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ0P1qHe1ag

The Truth About Al Gore
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQygvUrBMGU

Global Warming - Al Gore sued by 30.000 Scientists
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6zpHtbM3hc

Carbon offset trading fraud -- huge criminal activity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEPUxE2uIw

THE 21st Century Scam--Carbon Credits Trading
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjbtU2UJhyw